TCS Daily

High Yield Heroes

A remarkably broad coalition of international heroes -- including two
Nobel Peace Prize laureates - is calling for sustainably higher yields
of crops and forest products in the crucial 50 years just ahead.

The coalition kicked off their effort at a news conference in
Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. Its members say that we cannot save the
forests and wild species, let alone end global hunger, if we rely on
low-yield production of food and wood. They recommend no particular
technologies, but note world harvests of food and forest products must
double by 2050

I call the coalition members heroes because they're willing to put
their enormous reputations behind politically incorrect strategies.
They argue for intensive farming and tree plantations. They are
concerned about traditional, low-yield farming systems, and letting
trees burn instead of becoming timber. Most of all, they agree that
high yields are vital for humanity and the planet.

The leader of the new coalition is Dr. Norman Borlaug, the Iowa
plant breeder who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the
Green Revolution. He and his fellow researchers saved a billion people
from starving during the 1960s. But Borlaug was also the first to note
(in 1986) that the higher crop yields saved billions of acres of
wildlands from being plowed down for low-yield food. Today, the total
of wildlands saved by high yield farming has risen to at least 12
million square miles (not acres), equal to the total land area of the
United States, Europe, and South America. (Or 3,400 Yellowstone
National Parks.)

The second Nobel Peace Prize laureate to join the conservation
coalition is former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, who won in 1986
for his Central American peace efforts. Today, he serves as an
ambassador for the FutureHarvest network of internationally funded
Third World agricultural research centers. He says 2 billion people
live in or near the Third World forests that are home to three-fourths
of the world's wildlife species --and the only way they can feed their
families is to burn more forest and hunt more wild animals for
bushmeat. Higher-yield research in biology, ecology, chemistry, and
technology is the only way to give these poor people better
opportunities. Yet FutureHarvest's global research budget last year was
a paltry $340 million.

The other coalition leaders:

Former U.S. Senator George McGovern is currently an "ambassador to
the hungry" for the United Nations. He says the world for the first
time has the science and the financial power to finally end hunger --
and world population growth is rapidly tapering off, so there's no
longer any fear that high-yield farming will produce an overcrowded
planet. But without higher yields, McGovern warns, we'll pit the food
needs of malnourished African kids against the preservation of Africa's
unique wildlife. He also fears more genocide (as in crowded Rwanda,
where one million people hacked each other to death in 1994) and more
support among poor Moslem farmers for suicide bombers.

Patrick Moore of Canada was a co-founder of Greenpeace, but now
rejects that group's anti-science confrontations. Moore reminds us that
wood is the most environmentally friendly building material, and the
most renewable. (He asks: "Where is the Green Steel and the Green
Concrete?") High-yield tree management can support economic growth and
literacy for all the peoples of the world -- and retain more
biodiversity than a narrow fixation on wild forests alone.

Eugene Lapointe is a former secretary-general of CITES, the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, and now
president of the World Conservation Trust. He favors "wise use"
harvests of wildlife -- where the earnings will produce more of the
wildlife. For example, he wants African villagers to share in revenues
from tourists and licensed elephant hunters -- so the villagers will
have a stake in stopping elephant poachers.

James Lovelock, the famous British chemist-philosopher who authored
the Gaia Hypothesis, believes the whole earth is a living organism --
rocks, seas, atmosphere, and living organisms. He says we cannot manage
the planet because we can't manage what's really important -- the tiny
stuff like plankton and soil bacteria. However, we should avoid doing
damage, such as clearing the tropical forests to plant corn and
cassava.

Dr. Per Pinstrup-Anderson won the 2001 World Food Prize for his
long-term projections of world food and cropland requirements. He's
been documenting the slowing surge of world population -- along with
the soaring Third World demand for resource-costly foods like meat,
milk and fruit.

These high-yield heroes invite agriculturists, foresters, and true conservationists all over the world to stand with them, by co-signing the "Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-yield Farming and Forestry."